There are unquestionably management issues which have adversely affected some infrastructure projects in the City.
However, I think its important to pull things apart a bit.
1) Is the issue for a given project a 'contractor' issue? If so, is there a general remedy, or is this about banning one particular contractor?
2) The allotted time for projects once they start. I don't think one can describe a project that starts within a week of the date specified in the tender and which finishes by any date specified in the tender as mismanaged in respect of timing.
However, we may rightly quibble in some cases that the time allotted for work is excessive and this can create additional inconvenience to pedestrians/cyclists/transit riders/drivers/businesses etc.
There are ways to address this, but they are policy and financial decisions rather than contract management ones. (enforcement/oversight of contracts is management); but should the City impose 'Centre Court' hours on jobs? 12 - hours per day, 6 days per week
You can actually leave scheduling to the contractor, but the estimated time to deliver a project has to be based on an assumption of how many hours of labour per week will go into the job.
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Equally, there is a tendency currently to schedule each agency/stakeholder to do their work completely independently on road reconstructions. So, as an example, you might see that Toronto Water will do watermains in 2024 on a road; in 2025 Toronto Hydro does work, in 2026 Rogers/Telus do their thing, in 2027 the City reconstructs the road.
The idea is to avoid having one group step on the other, and to have any delays from one agency/group not affect the other's schedule. However, the impact on cost and timing is substantial. Each contractor has to dig up portions of the sidewalk/road to do their work, then must patch that sidewalk/road when finished. The next agency/stakeholder then rips off some of those patches and creates new holes to do their thing, then patches etc. There's a lot of wasted labour in this system. There should be no reason that most contractors can't be a on a job site either literally at the same time, or at least in much closer succession. But that's not the way its done.
Toronto's tendering process is an unholy mess. This is distinct from the departmental/project design issues. Toronto opted to centralize most tendering, just as it has purchasing, real estate, 311 and so many other things.
I would argue, by and large, these centralizations have been failures whose costs equal or exceed their benefits. The centralized queues can take weeks or months to get a tender out, well beyond what was intended by the tendering department.
This can result in blowing up those carefully laid out consecutive work schedules and causing massive knock-on delays.
This is exacerbated by the need to tender even very small works, fix a curb here, a turning radii there etc. The City has lost much of its capacity to do that work in-house, and even where it exists policy may mandate going to tender. This can literally add months to getting anything done.
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The City does have an accountability problem on projects. In general, one person or team leads a design, but there are overlapping teams due to the various silos I've noted above and in other posts. Once the project heads off to tender, it is often not clearly assigned to anyone to oversee. Purchasing managed the tender process, but often lacks the technical expertise to assure compliance w/the tender. This is a key problem in pulling tender processes out of their respective departments. That the people managing tenders may not be subject matter experts in the fields over which they hold sway. Tender rules/policies which may make sense for one department or project type may not make sense for another.
The City is aware of this, and is proposing changes to make one person/unit responsible for a project throughout its life. Good idea; I have some worry about how it will be functionally delivered.
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The City has very little power over its own agencies. Toronto Water and Toronto Hydro (especially the latter) pay next to no penalty, most of the time, if they fail to start/finish projects on an agreed to timeline. If there's no penalty of any kind,
then why change?
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The City has an issue with drawings...........so many projects find so many things under a road or within a structure that are not in line w/the City's records.
Something is true here, either contractors, private and public are making on-the-fly changes and not reporting them back to the City during construction; or the City has that information and is not using it to make sure drawings on file are up to date.
Again, accountability and penalties; the drawings need to be right.
Not helping is that the City sometimes has a finished design gather dust for upwards of 10 years as it gets bumped down the priority chain; it often escapes notice that others have done work in the intervening period between the project design and the tender.
